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Caribou Habitat Assessment and Supply Estimator (CHASE) – Wildlife Infometrics Inc.

Our Client

Wildlife Infometrics Inc.
September 2006 - December 2006
http://www.wildlifeinfometrics.com/

Project Background

Declines in caribou herd populations throughout British Columbia (BC) are the result of many factors including: global climate change, habitat modification from resource development, displacement by human activity, and increased mortality. Recently, predation by wolves has had the most serious effect on herd populations – especially of those in southern BC. Many of these herds now number fewer than 50 animals.

Wildlife Infometrics Incorporated (WII) in MacKenzie, BC maintains CHASE – a caribou habitat supply modeling tool. CHASE has assisted planners in government and industry with the management of habitat for woodland caribou for many years and has been applied to identify winter ranges of legal status and to aid decisions about recovery of local herds. CHASE is comprised of several disparate components: ArcView 3, Norsys Netica and Microsoft Access. Until now, each application of CHASE has required trained technicians to perform time-consuming and repetitive procedures to generate habitat results for summary.

WII sought Refractions' expertise in spatial systems design and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming in ESRI's ArcObjects to consolidate CHASE's complicated workflow into an easy-to-use application controlled from a user-friendly dashboard.

Refractions' Solution

The client's primary interest was that the new software be compatible with their upcoming migration to ESRI's ArcGIS 9.2 (from 9.1). With this in mind, Refractions proposed an ESRI ArcGIS/ArcObjects solution to replace the existing workflow based largely on ArcView 3.2 and AVENUE.

It was important that the new system produce exactly the same results as the original system, so we ensured we had lots of information for quality control:

We collected inputs, intermediate results, and outputs from the existing model.
We compared the results at each step when debugging the new system.
We ensured that the final deliverable produced the same results as the original system.

Converting from ArcView 3.X to ArcGIS 9.2 required a complete re-write of all the GIS processing routines, from originals in Avenue to the new code in ArcObjects/VBA. Some of the routines in ArcObjects did not have exact analogues to the original Avenue routines, and had to be carefully matched to new functions in the ESRI API and tested for consistency with the old routines.

The Result

AUTO-CHASE provides a central, graphical user-interface (GUI)-driven platform from which to specify parameters for and run CHASE modeling operations. The application interface requires limited user-input and handles all intermediate data and model output locations internally. Final outputs are identical in schema and format to the previous version (CHASE).

Client Benefits

The automation of AUTOCHASE allows broader use of WII's caribou habitat assessment and supply estimator models, through:

An expanded user pool given the simpler implementation, and
Greater efficiency and decreased potential for error given reduced user contact time

The end result allows WII to provided it's clients with the capability to monitor caribou habitat faster and at lower costs than before.